Kylo Ren's Command Shuttle: Disney Star Wars The Force Awakens Diecast Vehicle

With enormous stabilizers that create an imposing profile when in flight or when landed, Kylo Ren's Command Shuttle is an impressive sight.

• Finely detailed die cast metal
• Semi-retractable wings
  
  

Rey's Speeder Bike: Star Wars The Force Awakens 3.75-inch Vehicle (Jakku)

For quick transportation across the junk-strewn dunes of Jakku, Rey relies on her old salvaged speeder. This Rey’s Speeder Bike (Jakku) vehicle comes with a special edition Rey (Jakku) figure and an accessory.

Finn: Star Wars The Force Awakens Desert Mission Figure (Jakku)

A trained warrior desperate to escape his past, Finn is plunged into adventure as his conscience drives him down a heroic, but dangerous, path.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens Vehicle Poe Dameron's X-Wing

When missions call for it, ace Resistance pilot Poe Dameron becomes Black Leader, flying a dark-hulled T-70 X-wing starfighter into action. Poe Dameron’s X-Wing comes with 2 accessories and a missile, as well as a Poe Dameron figure.

C-3PO: Star Wars The Black Series Figure

• #16 C-3PO; actual size is about 3.75 Inches tall
• Re-create the biggest battles and missions in the Star Wars epic with figures from The Black Series! This highly articulated figure is part of the ultimate Star Wars figure collection. He looks like C-3PO down to the last detail, including his realistic-looking metal limbs.
  
  

PZ-4CO: Star Wars The Force Awakens 3.75" Droid

PZ-4CO is a constant fixture in Resistance base control rooms, offering tactical data and communications support during important operations.

Star Wars Vanity Fair: The Empire Reboots!

 

The Empire reboots with an exclusive first look with photos by Annie Lebovitz of the old heroes, the new heroes and the high stakes! How a new generation is shaking up Hollywood's biggest franchise.

Abrams, a boyish 48, with wiry hair and black-framed nerd glasses, was seated in a small, plush screening room with a dozen or so associates, including visual-effects supervisor Roger Guyett and Abrams’s longtime producing partner Bryan Burk. The group was teleconferencing with Industrial Light & Magic, the San Francisco–based effects company, as well as a second unit in London, with the artists and technicians represented on-screen by their works in progress and on the sound system by their disembodied voices. It was a session you might think would be tense, even fraught, given the stakes on this film, the first Star Wars movie in 10 years and the first ever without creator and fanboy lightning rod George Lucas, who three years ago sold his production company, Lucasfilm Ltd., along with all rights to Star Wars, to the Walt Disney Company.

Jakku set with director J.J. Abrams.

The crew of the Millennium Falcon.

They should also be heartened by the cast Abrams and Lucasfilm have assembled, which includes Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill, reprising their original Star Wars roles as Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker for the first time in three decades, as well as an impressive list of young newcomers to the series, including Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Domhnall Gleeson—plus Max von Sydow, imparting the same kind of old-school Euro-gravitas that Sir Alec Guinness lent the original. Anthony Daniels and Peter Mayhew will also be back, wreathed in metal and in mohair and yak fur respectively, as C-3PO and Chewbacca.

A colorful array of galactic travelers, smugglers, and other assorted riffraff fill the main hall of pirate Maz Kanata’s castle. Photographs by Annie Leibovitz.

In preparation for selling the company, Lucas had decided to make more movies.
He sketched out ideas for episodes VII, VIII, and IX, to be set initially several decades after Return of the Jedi, and approached Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill about re-upping. He shared his story outlines with Disney during their courtship phase. But after the deal was done, “Disney and Kathy decided they should consider other options,” as Abrams (not then involved) diplomatically put it. He said Lucas’s treatments had centered on very young characters—teenagers, Lucasfilm told me—which might have struck Disney executives as veering too close for comfort to The Phantom Menace and its 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker and 14-year-old Queen Amidala. “We’ve made some departures” from Lucas’s ideas, Kennedy conceded, but only in “exactly the way you would in any development process.”

By mid-January 2014, Abrams and Kasdan had a draft, most of it hashed out in plein air conversations recorded on an iPhone as they walked and talked for hours at a time through cityscapes that changed according to the vagaries of Abrams’s schedule.

Discussing the shoot, Abrams was quick with praise for his young cast but seemed most excited by his encounters with ghosts of Star Wars past: “The whole thing was as surreal and impossible as you can imagine. I mean, walking onto the Millennium Falcon set?” (That would be Han Solo’s iconic spaceship.) “To be on it, it’s insane. There were people who literally cried when they walked onto that set. It’s a strange thing, the effect it has.”

Abrams has known Harrison Ford for years.
Abrams was also acquainted with Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, and so, he said, when they all met for the film, along with Kennedy, with whom he went even further back, “there was a bizarre feeling of everything coming together in a way I never could have anticipated.” And yet, Abrams added, he was “terrified at the prospect of directing Harrison as Han Solo. . . It wasn’t just about directing one of the great actors in film history. It was about directing one of the great actors in film history playing a character that was certainly one of his two defining characters.” Abrams had met with Ford during the script process. “We talked about what we were thinking for the story, and he liked what he was hearing. He was excited to get back in those shoes again, which was really interesting because I thought he hadn’t been a fan. I kept hearing those rumors when I was a kid.”

The shoot would take nearly six months, from mid-May through early November, with locations including Abu Dhabi, Ireland, Wales, and an R.A.F. base in England.
By all accounts things went smoothly aside from one serious hiccup, a month in, when a part of the Millennium Falcon set fell on Ford and broke his leg. Production was held up for two weeks, but in Abrams’s mind there were unexpected blessings. “In a weird way,” he said, “it was the greatest gift to the movie that, once it was clear Harrison would be O.K., the way that the crew came together. I’ve never seen a crew bonded like that. And when Harrison came back, when I say he came back better and stronger than ever, I can’t overstate that. There was a fire in his eyes that you see in the movie.” The hiatus also gave Abrams time to take stock of what he was doing and rethink some sequences that normally would have had to be fixed in post-production or via expensive re-shoots.

Star Wars Celebration: 'Force Awakens' costume exhibit

April 17, 2015

Fans at this week's Star Wars Celebration got a sneak peek of some new gear from a galaxy far, far away at the 'Force Awakens' costume exhibit. Among the gleaming white Flametrooper armor, and a close up look at villain Kylo Ren.

5 revelations from the Carrie Fisher Q&A at Star Wars Celebration

by Chris Lee

StarWars.com
April 17 2015

At Anaheim’s Star Wars Celebration Thursday, Carrie Fisher teased details about Princess Leia’s franchise reappearance in Star Wars: The Force Awakens this Christmas. No, she won’t be wearing her famous hair buns nor that metal bikini from Return of the Jedi. “But we have an alternate thing I think you’ll be into,” Fisher allowed.

On Friday, Fisher returned to the stage for a spotlight Q&A session, “Date With a Princess.” But it might have more accurately been titled “The Princess Diaries” considering the actress/novelist/screenwriter/monologist’s disarming habit of meeting every query with maximum candor and her trademark ability to beat everyone in the room to the punchline.

“I am so bad at these [Q&As] that they have to keep me at home,” Fisher said at the outset. “I didn’t understand how many things were spoilers.”

Before nearly 5,000 people (and accompanied by her French bulldog Gary), Fisher, 58, took a stroll down memory lane, dishing behind-the-scenes anecdotes about appearing in Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

Shown a montage of her kissing other characters in the films, she referred to herself piquantly as a “space slut.” At another point Fisher dropped an F-bomb into conversation—not exactly the best idea in an event for Padwans of all ages—before recovering herself. “Around here, the F-word is for Force!” she exclaimed. To which someone in the crowd replied, “I want to Force you!” And Fisher shot back: “That Forcer said the F-word to me!” Yeah, it was like that.

So with the worldwide paroxysm of excitement surrounding Lucasfilms’ trailer reveal Thursday still firmly in mind, herewith we list the five most surprising admissions from Fisher’s “Date With a Princess”:

Salon Treatment

Achieving Leia’s unforgettable hairdo—a side-part with sculptural mounds of follicular ear muffs—was no easy feat. “It took two hours to do that hairstyle. I would come in at 5 in the morning, before anybody. I would come in plain and end up looking pretty. Pretty weird!” Fisher explained. “Later on, I did Saturday Night Live. I was playing Princess Leia, they clunked a hairpiece on and it looked exactly the same.”

Billy Dee Williams’ special je ne sais quoi

Playing Lando Calrissian, a gambler-entrepreneur living in Cloud City on the planet Bespin in The Empire Strikes Back, Williams used a special technique to put Fisher at ease. “Right before he would kiss my hand, he would say something incredibly filthy so I would laugh,” she said to whoops of laughter from the audience. “Something about the Force and it being with me. Everybody was always trying to make everyone else laugh on that movie. He was a lot of fun to work with.”

Cloudy With a Chance of Stones

Staying in London for the filming of Empire, Fisher’s choice of accommodation led to an unforgettable chance meeting—not to mention certain lasting filmic evidence. “I was young. Oh so young! Eric Idle, who was in Monty Python, rented me his house, but then he stayed at his house. Then he invited the Rolling Stones over. You know how that happens? Like, ‘Oh my God again? Just tell Keith…’” Fisher joked.

“I said to Harrison [Ford], ‘The Rolling Stones are going to come over!’ We had a really early call. You had to measure it: the Rolling Stones or early call? The Rolling Stones or early call? Both! They’re a partying bunch of guys. I told you before I didn’t really drink. But to be amenable, I drank. I used to say I’m allergic to drinking. This would have been a demonstration of that.”

“So we stayed up pretty late,” she continued. “Then we got to the set two hours later. We weren’t hung over. We were still in our cups! If you look at those scenes, Harrison and I are smiling when we arrive in Cloud City. Doesn’t that sound like a euphemism? We arrived in Cloud City where we were forced to go by the Stones.”

Mommy Complex

Asked by a fan in the Star Wars Celebration crowd what she would say if she could ask her movie mother Queen Padme (played by Natalie Portman in Star Wars Episodes I-III) anything, Fisher demurred. “’I wish I looked more like you.’ I’m OK but she’s the babe,” she said. “I have only met Natalie once. She asked me to give her an award. Her agent was my child’s father [agent Bryan Lourd]. So in Hollywood, that’s like being related.”

Fisher’s favorite scene in any of her Star Wars movies?

“That’s a hard question. I liked jumping to light speed. I’m still trying to jump to light speed even now,” Fisher said. “I’m going to think about that for an hour.”

Then the answer arrived with alacrity: “Probably one of the scenes where I said something awful to Harrison. ‘Scruffy-looking Nerf herder. What a moron!’”

Star Wars The Clone Wars: Darth Maul Returns DVD

Darth Maul Returns.

After Dathomir falls prey to a merciless attack by General Grievous, Asajj Ventress survives to join a bounty hunting clan led by a young Boba Fett. Meanwhile, the dark warrior Savage Opress returns to his creator, the witch Mother Talzin, who gives him a sinister mission: to search the galaxy for his brother, Sith Apprentice Darth Maul. Believed dead for over a decade after falling to the sword of then Jedi Apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Maul is nearly unrecognizable, residing in the bowels of a ruined planet and fueled by hatred. Savage Opress delivers shattered Maul to Mother Talzin to restore his former powers, and the brothers vow an oath of vengeance against Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Enjoy this 90-minute movie special from the last 4 episodes of the season.